How Hard Can It Be for a French Girl to Go on Vacation?

Filled with talkative young French people, “Le Rayon Vert” is quintessential Eric Rohmer. The premise — one woman’s attempt to go on summer vacation — is almost laughably banal, something like a satire on the French vacation obsession.

Yet the film may be Rohmer’s most mysterious.

Called “Summer” when it was released in the United States in August 1986, it opens on Friday at the Metrograph for a weeklong run in a vintage 35-millimeter print.

“Le Rayon Vert” (“The Green Ray”) is a movie of paradoxes — and none more than its protagonist, Delphine, played by Marie Rivière (also credited with collaborating on the script). She is at once tentative and forthright, indecisive and opinionated.

When her initial vacation plans go awry, Delphine consults friends, family and the boyfriend who jilted her. She makes three attempts to leave Paris (with two dispirited returns), amounting to a little tour of France. Her first abortive vacation is with a friend’s family in Cherbourg. Her next getaway, to the Alps, lasts less than a day. A longer stay in Biarritz brings her crisis to a head.

Delphine has standards. She’s not stubborn, she explains, life is. She’s a picky eater whose diatribe regarding meat is the comic high point of her stay in Cherbourg. Boats make her nauseated. She’s opposed to picking flowers. Plus, she’s a crybaby.

Why is she sympathetic rather than annoying? For one thing, she’s fun to watch — sharp-featured, expressive and animated. Rohmer, who put Ms. Rivière in nine feature films, loves to observe her. For another, she’s so human. (Late in the movie it’s revealed that the book she’s been reading is “The Idiot.”)

“Le Rayon Vert” may be a sort of documentary-portrait but it’s governed by omens and coincidence. (However rational, Delphine has “personal superstitions.”) Most significant is a conversation she overhears regarding a Jules Verne novel, “The Green Ray,” titled for a rare phenomenon that occurs around a setting or rising sun.

The novel is romantic, as is Delphine. Does she suffer from anhedonia, or fear of pleasure, the condition that Woody Allen used as the original name for “Annie Hall”? Her encounter with a free-spirited Swedish woman, met on the beach at Biarritz, throws her into despair, a setup for what might be a miracle.

Although conservative by nature, Rohmer made occasional experiments — or perhaps leaps of faith. “Le Rayon Vert” was one. According to his biographers Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, he was impressed by the degree to which his fellow filmmaker Jacques Rivette incorporated improvisation in a fictional framework.

“Le Rayon Vert” was shot documentary-style in 16-millimeter and chronological order. The actors, many nonprofessional, improvised their dialogue. The film was so inexpensive that the special effect in the final scene and the expense of enlarging it to 35-millimeter accounted for half of the modest budget.

Rohmer waited two years to release the movie, which then won the Golden Lion at the 1986 Venice Film Festival. Not the least of its miracles, according to Mr. de Baecque and Mr. Herpe, was that it became “one of the most profitable films in the history of French cinema.”

Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies playing in New York’s repertory theaters.